The End of the Moment We Had

but the performance continued, didn’t matter how drunk I was or what I was thinking or what my eyes were doing. The performers started shouting questions from the stage, and the audience was supposed to answer yes or no. There must’ve been ten questions they shouted. But now I can only remember one, which was the last one. Is Bush bad? There was a louder response than for any of the earlier questions, and people shouted from here and there, from everywhere really, the whole audience was shouting, yes! yes! yes! yes! But at the end, overlapping with the last cries of yes!—strictly speaking, a tiny bit after—was a single loud no! It was a man’s voice. Of course all the performers looked towards where the voice came from. They could tell right away who had said it. One of the performers said they wanted to hear what the man had to say, then the interpreter translated the request. The man approached the mic. He walked like he was trying to avoid looking sheepish but also didn’t want to seem too eager. Whatever was on his mind as he walked to the mic stand, it took him a few moments to get there. Then he spoke to the crowd that had been waiting to hear what he was going to say: So, I’m guessing I was called out because you want to know why I said no—and here he smiled in a way that could be read as either natural or unnatural. He seemed to be wanting to give off a casual feel. He continued speaking, his smile still lingering. So, the reason is pretty simple, basically, everyone here said yes, which feels a little creepy, and that was my main reason. I don’t like Bush from a standpoint of policy or anything like that. Rather than thinking about whether or not my answer is actually no, I just felt like at least one person had to say no, otherwise we’d have everybody here saying yes and that doesn’t feel right, it actually feels a little dangerous. That was really it. The interpreter put all of that into English. While she was doing her thing, the man kept smiling. As if reacting to that, the interpreter had a little smile on her face too as she spoke in English. After a brief silence, the black guy who told the story about Dunkin’ Donuts nodded forcefully. He kept nodding and said that if he was watching the performance as an audience member, he probably would have said no for the same reason. The interpreter said that in Japanese. That was the end of that interaction. After that a few more people got up and said things. Up on stage, the performers talked more, in response to the comments from the audience, or not. Every so often through the night the performers played some terrible covers. The guitars, the keyboards, the drums, the vocals, it was all awful. But it didn’t really matter. Some of the songs they played were originals. Those were awful too. After each one someone else would get up and say something and someone would respond. Speaking, music, repeat. As the performance went on, never deviating from that pattern, it became easier for people to go up to the mic and speak. But at the same time the audience was growing tired of the repetition, bit by bit but plain enough to see. Then it got to the point where most of the audience was starting to feel that this loose performance, loose in both the good and the bad sense, would soon come to an end. I felt it too. By that point I was already feeling like I wasn’t in Japan. The girl and I took that feeling to the hotel, where we spent the next four days with it. Several times we tried to figure out where the feeling came from. But we never came up with anything that seemed right. It couldn’t have been just because the performers were foreigners. Nearly everything the performers talked about had to do with the war that was about to start. The clock was ticking down on the ultimatum Bush gave Iraq, and the whole world was paying attention, all they could do was watch and wait. Everyone knew what was going to happen, but it hadn’t happened yet. The performance took place in the middle of all this. So it was obvious that one of the aims of the performance was to spark a debate about what was happening. And sure enough some people went to the mic and said what they had to say about it, while others stood up without having anything particular in mind, Sorry, they said, I don’t really have anything to say but I just kind of came up to the microphone anyway, then they shrugged and waddled back to their seat.

When we were at the hotel, our conversation kept going back to the performance—by the time that interpreter girl went up to the mic, everyone had pretty much had it, I doubt anyone was actually listening to her, which kind of sucks—is what I said, and so she was like, yeah, but you know she’s always, I mean she never really pays attention to the vibe, or it’s like whatever the feel is, it has nothing to do with her, it’s basically always that way with her.

We picked the hotel at random, and the room was pretty cheaply put together, but that was fine. At first I thought the wallpaper was old and grimy, and it was only later that I realized it was just pink wallpaper. She let her thick hair down, so the diagonal line of her fringe was gone. Without that she had a different feel, maybe less subdued. I noticed that her eyes angled up at the corners. The conversation trailed off, maybe we weren’t done talking but there was a break, and we nuzzled in close